Links

Lessons from Gutenberg

The codebase of Gutenberg is difficult for all of us, because no one in the wpa11y team is a skilled React developer. So it was hard to implement changes and write PRs ourselves. What we could do is test, tell what’s wrong and what it should be and hope a developer would pick it up. A lot of a11y work has been done by the Gutenberg team but major issues still exist.
…
The results indicated so many accessibility issues that most testers refused to look at Gutenberg again.
—Rian Rietveld

Note "a11y" means "Accessibility", because of course we don't write it all out.

All of this suggests that Gutenberg was pushed out because it was useful in business competition with SquareSpace, not because it helps any WordPress users. The classic rich text editor was fine for many newbies, and then they'd graduate to HTML or Markdown, neither of which are rocket surgery, when they needed more control.

Despite my heavy use of JavaScript, I've never touched React. It seems to be an attempt to combine a native UI model with web rendering, which is an utterly alien environment. But there are minimal React a11y guidelines; many of these seem tedious to implement, like those dropdowns, but not impossible. This likely would've gone better with static HTML and normal JS controls where necessary to create blocks.

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

Search ahead to "Part V" to see the paper summaries and reviewer comments! These are ridiculous, and should never, ever have been accepted.

“This is a wonderful paper – incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation. The author’s development of the focus and contributions of the paper is particularly impressive. The fieldwork executed contributes immensely to the paper’s contribution as an innovative and valuable piece of scholarship that will engage readers from a broad cross-section of disciplines and theoretical formations. I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published and congratulate the author on the research done and the writing.” -Reviewer 1, Gender, Place, and Culture
—comment on "Dog Park"

Daylight Savings Sunday Music

Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air
The summer's out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets
The sun goes down alone
I'm driving by your house
Though I know you're not home

But I can see you
Your brown skin shining in the sun
You got your hair combed back and your
Sunglasses on baby
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone
—Don Henley, "The Boys of Summer"